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Author: valfeldman

This week was another time crunch, as I expect every week will be until this project is finally done! The animators are continuing to lock our shots, Josh is rendering out character passes, and textures are underway. Anthony has made some awesome headway on our shoggoth-squishing destruction simulation, and Ethan has finished storyboarding the new 3D motion graphics sequence. We’ve contacted somebody to assist with sound effects and audio balancing, ironed out the final changes in the edit, and started gathering some awesome photo reference for matte paintings.

Overall, all wheels are spinning full steam ahead. Nothing to do now but keep at it until we’re finished!

I’ll admit to falling behind this week, which I feel awful about since everybody on the team is working ridiculous hours to get everything animated and finished up. I haven’t missed any hard deadlines or put us behind schedule, but I’ve largely neglected the environment texturing (all due 5/10) to catch up on client / grad thesis work. I’ll be having a Mudbox Marathon this weekend to make up for lost time.

I spent my time this week beginning the hunt for usable sound effects, setting up meetings with our new audio guy (Dominic Zapalla, a film senior), creating the first draft of our presentation, and checking in on everyone to make sure our deadlines are in good shape. The presentation is still a bit rough, but since the focus was on organization of content I think we’ll be in good shape for revisions.

This week, I’ve begun final rendering of the project. Just the character passes for now, as the environments still need to have their shaders finalized, but this works out since the character passes generally take much longer to render. Our animators are hard at work locking down shots, and have done a great job at keeping me busy prepping files and sending them off to be rendered. During the brief periods of time where I’m caught up with them, I’ve been workin on shaders and models for the environments. Luckily we’re at the point in this project where many of the shaders can be recycled from similar scenes, which speeds up the process tremendously.

SO MANY THINGS. I got about 13 shots LOCKED and ready to be rendered. I’ve also taken some extra shots to help out the other animators so I’ve been working on those too. I don’t have much else to say except for all I did this week was non stop polishing shots.

This week I worked with Ethan to lock down as many environments as possible (all but one are ready to be shaded and rendered), and to help the team get ready for our presentation on Tuesday. For that, I worked with Ethan again to animate our Exterior Airplane shots.

This week was a whirling dervish of frenzied productivity. We all pulled our share of all-nighters, working tirelessly to meet our Sprint 1 objectives for the final project check-in. We’re so close to finishing everything!

The whole show is animated, but not quite locked down yet. We have roughly 1/3 of our shots locked and rendering on the farm, with plans to get the rest done by 5/10. 5/10 is also our texture deadline, after which Josh will start shading, lighting, and rendering the environments.

We’re still confident that this will get done on time, but it’s going to take all we have to do it. Let’s get this project done!